Multiethnic Literatures Research Articles

About the Contributors

Other| October 01 2021 About the Contributors GLQ (2021) 27 (4): 663–664. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9316925 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation About the Contributors. GLQ 1 October 2021; 27 (4): 663–664. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9316925 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search Kai Cheang is assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. Kai's teaching and research areas include queer theory, transnational sexualities, and Hong Kong studies, as well as multiethnic literatures and cultures in the US and the UK. Kai's current book project, “Untimely Developments: Queer Temporalities in Global Anglophone Hong Kong Literature and Culture,” assembles a literary archive of alternative pasts and futures as imagined by queer and feminist anglophone writers in Hong Kong and the larger Asian diaspora. Kai's writings have appeared in MELUS, Pacific Coast Philology, Alif, Gender Forum, and Social Text Online.Freda L. Fair is assistant professor of gender and women's studies and black studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Freda's research focuses on race, gender, sexuality, and culture in the United States with a focus on the American Midwest. Their writing... You do not currently have access to this content.

“I Tell Heem Nothing!”: Education and the Americanization of Italian Immigrants at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Research Article| January 01 2021 “I Tell Heem Nothing!”: Education and the Americanization of Italian Immigrants at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Cristina Stanciu Cristina Stanciu CRISTINA STANCIU, PhD, is an associate professor of English and director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is co-editor of Laura Cornelius Kellogg: “Our Democracy and the American Indian” and Other Writings (Syracuse University Press, 2015) and of the MELUS special issue “Pedagogy in Anxious Times” (2017). Her work has appeared in American Indian Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Multiethnic Literatures of the United States, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and College English, among others. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award (2019-2020), an Obama Institute Fellowship (Germany), an NEH summer stipend, and an AAUW postdoctoral fellowship. She currently serves as book review editor of the journal MELUS. Her book from which this article is derived is forthcoming from Yale University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2021) 11 (1): 27–50. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.11.1.0027 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Cristina Stanciu; “I Tell Heem Nothing!”: Education and the Americanization of Italian Immigrants at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. Italian American Review 1 January 2021; 11 (1): 27–50. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.11.1.0027 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Teaching Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States: Pedagogy in Anxious Times

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Teaching Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States: Pedagogy in Anxious Times

West of Harlem: African American writers and the borderlands

Luminaries of the Harlem RenaissanceuLangston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Arna Bontemps, among othersuare associated with, well ...Harlem. But the story of these New York writers unexpectedly extends to the American West. Hughes, for instance, grew up in Kansas, Thurman in Utah, and Bontemps in Los Angeles. Toomer travelled often to New Mexico. Indeed, as West of Harlem reveals, the West played a significant role in the lives and work of many of the artists who created the signal urban African American cultural movement of the twentieth century. Uncovering the forgotten histories of these major American literary figures, the book gives us a deeper appreciation of that movement, and of the cultures it reflected and inspired. These recovered experiences and literatures paint a new picture of the American West, one that better accounts for the disparate African American populations that dotted its landscape and shaped the multi-ethnic literatures and cultures of the borderlands. Tapping literary, biographical, historical, and visual sources, Emily Lutenski tells the New Negro movementAEs western story. HughesAEs move to Mexico opens a window on African American transnational experiences. ThurmanAEs engagement with Salt Lake City offers an unexpected perspective on African American sexual politics. Arna BontempsAEs Los Angeles, constructed in conjunction with Louisiana, provides a new vision of the Spanish borderlands. Lesser-known writer Anita Scott Coleman imagines black Western autonomy through domesticity. The experience of othersulike Toomer, invited to socialite Mabel Dodge LuhanAEs circle of artists in Taosupresent a more pluralistic view of the West. It was this place, with its transnational and multiracial mix of Native Americans, Latina/os, Anglos, and African-Americans, which buttressed ToomerAEs idea of a onew American race.o Turning the lens elsewhere, Lutenski also explores how Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American western writers understood and represented African Americans in the early twentieth-century borderlands. The result is a new, unusually nuanced and unexpectedly complex view of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the borderlands cultures that influenced their art in surprising and important ways.

Skin in the Game

Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship has examined how whiteness is socially constructed as “objective” and “neutral” in the US and elsewhere. This article seeks to trouble such a position for white teachers in the multiracial classroom, particularly those that focus on multiethnic literatures. Drawing upon scholarship in critical whiteness studies, personal experiences with students, and reflections on multicultural literature, this article advances an educational philosophy of investment wherein privilege and subjectivity are made legible in the learning process. In this model, educators and students work toward the discomfort that often comes from recognizing the risks and rewards of acknowledging one’s positioning within a racial order.

Introduction: Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures

The language of food fills the pages of multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. Food tropes, metaphors, and images serve as figures of speech which depict celebrations of families and communities, portray identity crises, create usable histories to establish ancestral connections, subvert ideology and practices of assimilation, and critique global capitalism. In the United States, relationships between food and ethnicity bear historical, social, cultural, economic, political, and psychological significance, in other words, ethnic identity formations have been shaped by experiences of food productions and services, culinary creativities, appetites, desires, hunger, and even vomit, This special issue of MELUS presents seven essays that centralize the multivalent meaning of food in various ethnic literary traditions, such as African American, Arab American, Asian American, Italian American, and Caribbean writing. Until recently, there had been little work done on the subject of food and American culture. The most celebrated writer has been M. F. K. Fisher, whose articles and personal essays on cooking are among the best literary renditions of food. A number of essay collections that have been published since the late 1980s, including Literary Gastronomy (1988), edited by David Bevan, Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture (1989), edited by Mary Anne Schofield, Gian-Paolo Biasin's The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel (1993), Susanne Skubal's Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction after Freud (2002), and Denise Gigante's Taste: A laterary History (2005), are single-author volumes that seriously consider the role that food plays in literature. None of these books explore the role that food and foodways play in ethnic American literature, however. Recently a few books have focused on the relationships between food and ethnic literatures and cultures, and each of them deals with a single ethnicity, such as Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Food and the Polilics of U.S. Identity (1999), Andrew Warnes' Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twenteeth-Century African American Literature (2004), and Jennifer Ann Ho's Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (2005). Two journals, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, edited by Dara Goldstein, and Alimentum: The Literature of Food, edited by Paulette Licitra and Peter Selgin, have appeared; these journals consider the diversity of American cuisine and its impact on changing notions of American culture. As demands for assimilation and inculcation of ethnic inferiority often impact the ethnic individual's alimentary desires, so does the restoration of ethnic dignity and pride operate through culinary enjoyment. In literature we have met many characters who spurn their ethnicities through disavowal of ethnic foodways. This particular expression of self-loathing is often engendered by the racist culture that degrades ethnic foodways as filthy and unhealthful, and the association with filth predictably gestures toward immorality. An exploration of foodways in ethnic American literature reveals much about the way cultural superiority and inferiority have been measured by native and ethnic groups. It is hard today to think that eating spaghetti was once considered to be downright uncouth, but a quick look at an article that appeared in the April 1897 Arena magazine by Frederick O, Bushee of South End House, a Boston settlement house similar to Jane Addams' Hull House, shows us how Italian foodways were considered un-American: The dinner of the ordinary Italian is made up largely of macaroni, French or Italian bread, and usually some meat and potato. That form of flour preparation known as spaghetti is the most frequently used. This is boiled whole and served as a first course. The Italian experiences no difficulty in eating this slippery food, for he merely sucks it into his mouth from his fork in a very unconventional if not elegant manner. …

What Are You Reading?

In one way or another, most of my recent readings have focused on diasporic and ethnic-minority literatures, experiences, and performances. From the late spring through midsummer, the readings I did in the context of a migratory experience in Europe produced new perspectives on questions of displacement, marginalization, and cross-cultural connections. I was invited to teach a graduate course on a departmental exchange with the Comparative Literature program of the University of Lisbon, and I designed a course called “Crossing Continents: Multiethnic Literatures of Europe and North America.” The course, taught in spring 2005, focused on understanding ways in which the critical paradigms used by literary and cultural critics in the United States might be extended profitably to the examination of immigrant and racial-minority cultures in Western Europe, and how diasporic and postcolonial models of migration developed by European scholars could expand the dimensions of U.S. ethnic studies.

Unsettling Calls for National Unity: The Pedagogy of Experimental Multiethnic Literatures

In the wake of the events at the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, calls for national unity in the United States have too often constructed a homogenous and narrow national identity that violently others multiethnic voices and experiences. Combined with the War on Terror, the increasing militarization along the US/Mexico border, and recent challenges to bilingual education and affirmative action, this political trend reflects a deep anxiety over US national identity. Moreover, recent attacks on multicultural curriculum in higher education have come in the interconnected form of the corporatization of higher education, budget cuts in humanities programs, and a conservative backlash against diversity requirements housed in ethnic studies; gender and women's studies; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender programs. In this climate, multiethnic literatures such as Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La The New Mestiza, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and Toni Morrison's Beloved offer invaluable potential to interrogate hegemonic constructs of the nation and reconceptualize both nation and national identity as a contestatory and changing set of categories. In my experience teaching these works, students express a kind of cognitive dissonance when reading such texts. As students perform the myriad shifting reading practices that the texts require, they hone productive tools with which to negotiate the different and sometimes conflicting responses to the literature that circulate within any given classroom space. These same tools can prove invaluable to re-reading narratives of national identity. This essay will first examine how the aesthetics of select multiethnic texts disrupt hegemonic constructs of the nation, and then will explore some pedagogical practices through which students engaged the dissonance produced by those contestatory narratives. One of the key issues this body of works raises is, of course, how multiethnic literature gets defined. In the larger field of literary studies, writing often conventional form, disrupts linear narrative and temporal sequence, mixes mediums and genres, shifts between characters' perspectives and voices, and self-reflexively comments on its form. Many of these aesthetic traits are also found in multiethnic literature, but the latter often questions the degree to which these characteristics are experimental since what breaks conventional form depends on how conventional form itself is defined, a definition which is shaped by historic and contemporary racial politics (see Morrison, Playing). Multiethnic literatures often reveal how meaning production is deeply embedded in the shifting categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nation. Such aesthetics, with a great deal of attention devoted to form, allow for the kind of cross-cultural pedagogy that Bonnie TuSmith calls for, in which multiethnic works are taught as works of art while also being situated within the specific cultural traditions from which they emerge, thus avoiding the reductive homogenization of multiethnic literary and cultural traditions (TuSmith 5). For instance, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza blurs established boundaries between theory and creative writing, poetry, essay, and autobiography to directly illustrate the thematic links among aesthetics, identity, and nation formation. Anzaldua's imagery illustrates that the violent splitting between cultures and nations is produced though international politics that have very real effects on the mestiza body. (1) Constant textual references to the US and Mexico, San Diego and Tijuana, mark the borders as more than internal divisions of personal identity, but also as external ones between nations that have material consequences for those inhabiting the borderlands: the border is a 1,950 mile-long open wound that not only divide[s] a pueblo, a culture, but also harshly divides the narrator, staking rods in [her flesh] (Anzaldua 2). …

Teaching the Politics of Identity in a Post-Identity Age: Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight

Since the early 1990s, I have taught several multicultural/multiethnic literature courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. As a faculty member teaching in a large California regional comprehensive university with a very diverse student body, I faced a number of concerns: How would 1 be able to cover diverse US ethnic literatures in a fifteen-week period'? What approach should I take that would not reduce complex literatures to an academic fast-food menu (it's Tuesday so we will be covering Asian American literature), especially since a number of ethnic studies departments already exist on my campus, and my own English department offers courses such as African American and North American Indian Literatures? Moreover, since nay campus has one of the largest university deaf populations in the country, how would I investigate the complex questions of against changing definitions of cultural groups and the ties that disability studies have to ethnic studies? (1) I decided that my course would concentrate on a theoretical, rather than historical, overview, focusing on shared theoretical concerns about literatures associated with people of color. Such a focus would allow the class to explore questions concerning canon formation, gender, race/ethnicity, class, disability, and sexuality. Examining the complex ways these issues intersect, I raised questions such as the following: What are the consequences of accepting or challenging essentialist definitions of gender and race? How do writers of color confront their often conflicting commitments to multiple subject positions? What are the potential difficulties of constructing an ethnopoetics? How do the current discussions on multiculturalism affect academia and the canon? How do we even decide who are multicultural/multiethnic writers, especially given our increasingly hybrid transnational world? By using such an open-ended approach, I encouraged students to engage in this problem-solving activity with me and to construct additional theoretical questions themselves. More and more, 1 found that one of the fundamental teaching challenges that I needed to confront was how to teach a class on multiethnic literatures in a so-called post-identity age. Initially, multicultural critics, engaging in the early battles of the culture wars, often focused on the expansion of the canon and academic curriculum, attempting to recover and discover writers to incorporate in a more inclusive canon and to give voice to identity-based communities. (2) In more recent decades, feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial critics have raised fundamental questions concerning issues of subjectivity, power, and community, thus challenging the concept of the unitary self. (3) Some critics have asked if such theories, in destabilizing the concept of a unified and coherent identity, have undermined fundamental ways to structure ethnic identity and hence undermined larger political goals toward social advancement for people of color. Other critics have argued that the very anti-foundational process at the heart of the postmodernist enterprise provides a means for an emancipatory politics. (4) More recently, postpositivist realists have argued for a theory that reclaims terms such as objectivity, and realism as a means of invoking social and political judgment. (5) In the midst of this lively debate, I, like many critics and teachers interested in multiculturalism, have examined ways to preserve categories of identities without resorting to an ethnic absolutism and essentialism, and ways to embrace such concepts as multiplicity and hybridity without resorting to a social and moral relativism. At the same time, I understand that these issues extend far beyond academic debates and discourse wars. My students, in going about their daily lives, must contend with the social and political consequences of the material effects of state and national understandings of multiculturalism and diversity. …

Pedagogy, Praxis, and Politics: an Introduction

This special issue has emerged in part from the conversations that took place at the 2002 MELUS conference in Seattle. The conference theme, Pedagogy, Praxis, and Politics: Multiethnic Literatures in US Education, attracted a large number of participants. MELUS members expressed a sense of excitement and common purpose in a three-day exchange of ideas on the challenges and rewards of teaching ethnic American literature. The year 2002 also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the MELUS organization. Over the years, colleges and universities across the United States have successfully instituted ethnic studies programs and have changed their curricula to include ethnically-identified works. The end of these three decades serves as a good starting point from which to take stock of the pedagogical/political practices in the field. Conversations on critical pedagogy have been taking place at various conferences and college campuses. A significant question that emerges for us in these dialogues is why, when multiethnic studies have attained a stable presence in the classroom, teachers and scholars continue to encounter a lack of institutional support and what are often negative evaluations of faculty who teach multiethnic studies. Critics like Gerald Graff, Henry Giroux, and John Guillory have written extensively about literature departments in which progressive changes in the curriculum have not translated into more positive experiences for ethnic minorities in higher education. In fact, the kind of liberal multiculturalism that institutions have adopted as a corrective to the history of racism is not in itself free of racism. The presence of ethnic studies in the curriculum has produced its own set of problems--problems that illustrate the limitations of institutional policies and practices. Curriculum reform is part of a larger project that seeks to address issues of race and ethnicity, such as the hiring of ethnic minority faculty and the recruitment and retention of students of color. However, this additive approach to multiculturalism often does little to effect more substantive and much needed changes in higher education. Curriculum reform implemented as part of diversity initiatives has not produced better working environments for ethnic faculty, for example. Altogether, a critique of institutional politics has concluded that the implementation of the worthwhile goal of inclusiveness has fallen far short of its promise. The implications of this critique have become more pronounced in the wake of 9/11. Critical inquiry of the dominant narratives and accepted policies in the US have become particularly vexed in the last three or four years. Critics in ethnic studies routinely question conventional narratives of nationhood and expose their racial underpinnings. Their hope, however utopian, is to fashion a more inclusive and less oppressive national self-image. However, those affiliated with powerful conservative and right-wing groups, such as Dinesh D'Souza, William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney, view this questioning itself as disruptive of national unity. Narratives of threatened national unity are not new and have historically been counterbalanced by calls for people of all races and colors to get along, a strategy especially poignant in wartime as individuals are conscripted to fight a perceived common enemy. Such calls for unity have often attempted to curtail the questioning of the status quo. The present political climate is no different, even as we confront a new set of historical circumstances. A cursory survey will turn up many recent, documented cases of backlash against faculty and students of color who are perceived as directly aligned with and beneficiaries of multiculturalism. In sum, the teaching of multiethnic literary studies, which in the past thirty-odd years has progressed under far from ideal conditions, must now contend with even more sinister challenges and threats to its relative successes. …

Towards an Ethics of Knowledge

In Geographies of Learning. Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance, Jill Dolan notes a persistent tension between academics and activists, one that positions who purportedly 'do' (as if one could 'do' without thinking) against assumed only to 'think' (as if thinking could ever be merely so). Ironically, this conflict sometimes manifests itself even in those disciplines that owe their institutionalization as academic fields of study to their ties with and histories as social movements advocating for social and political change. Not acknowledging this problem, Dolan suggests, often results in expert and vernacular knowledges working at cross-purposes when they might more productively align themselves in order to produce progressive policies. Moreover, leaving this antagonism unresolved can lead to unwitting alliance between radical activists and conservative scholars against progressive scholarship (1). While the friction Dolan identifies can indeed impede the productive exchange of information between intellectuals and their activist counterparts, I would argue that for those of us who claim to be both academics and activists, it is necessary to focus on the particular ways in which this divide manifests itself in the teaching of multiethnic literatures as one that positions lived experience against critical examination, identity against identification. Furthermore, I believe that the spaces between these distinct positions are of paramount importance and must be maintained in order to accomplish the laudable goals that Dolan sets for higher education. Specifically, such goals include turning theory into practice and encouraging both our students and ourselves to make political commitments in the process of becoming better thinkers. Clearly, the space of the classroom and our pedagogical practices constitute a foundation from which we might not just envision but engineer the productive (ir)resolution of conflict and difference. As I suggest in this essay, the practice of multiethnic literatures produces both remarkable opportunity and anxiety. For those of us who commit ourselves to working in what some have disparaged as victim studies, the issues of authority and legitimacy that were so contestatory while programs like Ethnic Studies were being established in institutions of higher education have taken on new forms. These challenges, less openly hostile and confrontational, are nonetheless still, and perhaps even more, operative at a time when public consensus about the goals and values of diversity +has seemingly been achieved and identity politics are derided as a kind of naive and idealistic posturing that refuses the theoretical insights produced by poststructuralism. (1) Given this context of covert challenges to those of us who teach multiethnic literatures and claim such texts as our professional field of study, the importance of formulating specific pedagogical practices through which a responsible model of knowledge production can be disseminated cannot be overestimated. In this essay, I argue for the need to frame explicitly in our teaching of multiethnic literature an ethics of knowledge and offer a set of strategies, derived from the literature itself, that can help us teach our students to be ethically oriented towards the study of alterity. The ethics of knowledge I propose here foregrounds the roles and responsibilities of authors, readers, and critics in the production of knowledge about those who are culturally different from themselves. Such an ethics would also address the humanistic impulse that many of our students are taught to celebrate--a valorization of similarity--and ask questions about the valuation of differences. In explicitly pursuing an ethics of knowledge, I argue that many of the traditional goals we set in order to evaluate pedagogical success (goals that include mastering the material, cultivating points of identification in order to effect intellectual inquiry, and producing in our students the pleasures that motivate academic enterprise) must be re-conceptualized if not actively countered. …

Literatures of the Americas, Latinidad, and the Re-Formation of Multi-Ethnic Literatures

In December 2002, The New York Times informed readers of a linguistics study that compares pronoun usage among Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican communities in New York City. This study of consequences of collision of Spanish dialects in New York is motivated by a root interest in the evolution of Latino identity in city and beyond. If linguists find dialects converging, they say may signal rise of a New York Spanish and perhaps signify an eventual of identities too. Professor Richard Otheguy explains, it could suggest that Latinos in New York are thinking of themselves less as members of national groups than they did in past and more as members of a broader community. However, he also emphasizes the possibility may be that contact with other Hispanics does not create a sense of Hispanic fraternity but just opposite. It creates a sense of wanting to be not mistaken for Mexican or Cuban. 'I want to be Ecuadorean' (Scott, B1). Among other things, this study and its rationale suggests a shift in how nation is figured in contemporary discussions of ethnic identity in United States. Together, these immigrants from across Americas (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Central America, Mexico, etc.) and linguists who parse their dialects demonstrate persistence of national identifications in Latino communities. And yet linguists' study and its guiding questions also suggest a perceived convergence of these groups into a new Latino identity and community in United States. In tracing linguistic origin point of a US-based latinidud, these scholars are participating in academic growth industry located at intersection of diasporic migration orders and dynamics of US ethnic community formations. Such enterprises are flourishing partly because of rising media interest in the Hispanic population explosion, but more importantly, I argue, also because example of Latinos suggests a number of cataclysmic shifts in how we understand ethnicity and community in United States. (1) Recently, Romain de la Campa offered model of split state as a means of conceptualizing these Latino communities in US who maintain economic, familial, and cultural ties to various homeland nations in Latin America and Caribbean from which (and to which) they migrate. (2) Numerous scholars working in many subfields of US ethnic studies are likewise concerned with constitutive transnational histories and relations that define contemporary conditions of minority ethnic communities in United States and elsewhere. (3) These projects highlight multiple national imaginaries (and government policies and economies) that constitute cultural and demographic realities in a transnational, multicultural United States in this epoch of globalization. Likewise, study of literatures has begun to acknowledge its own transnational and diasporic dimensions. In contrast, and perhaps with these trends in mind, MELUS editor Joseph Skerrett in 1998 describes his understanding of ethnic literatures in US as an fashioned construction of field (1). In Skerrett's view, multi-ethnic literatures need to reflect the range and depth of literary output of particular ethnic communities in US, which he defines by nation-state origins. Thus, Skerrett bemoans paucity of scholarship that prevented MEL US from being able to devote whole issues to Puerto Rican or Cuban-American or Brazilian-American Literature, but instead generated umbrella Latino/a Issue in 1998 (1). The paradigm of ethnic Americans that Skerrett invokes runs counter to most discussions of latinidad, as well as implicit de sign of those linguists who anticipate emergence of a New York Latino identity that reflects new political formations and goals rather than old nation-state origins and histories. …

The Road to Hyderabad: MELUS in India

Who is Katherine Newman? A few years ago, very few academics in India had heard her name. As for MELUS, we in India had heard of it, but only in passing and with scant interest. But now MELUS can boast of an Indian Chapter that is all of five years old and a steadily growing membership that runs into hundreds. MELUS-India has successfully conducted four conferences two national and two international and published two anthologies of essays. No mean achievement! This article focuses on the growth of American Studies in India, leading to the awakening of interest in the multi-ethnic literatures of the United States and the formation of the |ndia Chapter of MELUS. It begins with the big-bang advent of American Studies in the mid-twentieth century and ends with the present scenario which may not seem too bright at the moment but still contains reasons for hope. Scholarship, like trade, follows the flag (Mulder 74). American Studies in India inadvertently gets affected by fluctuations in US foreign policies and the changing relationship between India and the US. Over the last few years, with practically no financial support at all from Indian governmental sources, and with the US government pulling out of all funding commitments to organizations like the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad (ASRC), there is little or no incentive for the further progress of the discipline in India. Inevitably the question arises: what is the relevance of American Studies (and the study of multi-ethnic American literature) in India? What is its future, given the lack of state sponsorship? And how would one justify the existence of MELUS in India? The India Chapter of MELUS must confront these issues and make a concerted effort to keep Newman's spirit alive in regions beyond the US, to create an international network of scholars with the common interest of promoting a spirit of academic camaraderie unfettered by narrow prejudices of race, color, nationality, or religion. I In the 1950s there were several reasons for the growth and proliferation of American Studies. T.C. Bose lists three related causes: Indian goodwill towards the US during the mid-twentieth century, the emergence of the US as a superpower after World War II, and the role of US agencies in disseminating information on the culture and civilization of America in India (Bose 3-5). Going further back in time, the advent of American Studies in India may be traced to the rise of the Indian Nationalist Movement. B.K. Shrivastava, one of the earliest professors of American Studies in India, believes that the spirit of Indian nationalism led to the opening up of frontiers and a broadening of vision, enabling the Indian mind to turn with interest and curiosity towards events in the international arena (see Shrivastava). With the widening of perspectives came a revisioning of the world, the impact of which was felt on the Indian academic scene. Earlier, university and college teaching had been structured on the British model, but in the wake of independence, in 1947, came a questioning of the existing pattern of education and the need for a broader-based system. Attempts were made to transcend national concerns and open the doors to global issues. American Studies, by opening one possibility for Indian scholars to move beyond nationalist confines, seemed a step in this direction. In the US, a formal program for the expansion of American civilization and culture abroad began with the passage of the Fulbright Act (Public Law 584) in 1946. Fulbright Commissions were established in different countries to foster peace and mutual understanding through the United States Information Agency (USIA). The Fulbright Agreement in India (February 2, 1950) began an exchange of scholars and teachers between the US and India. The United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) played a major role in this exchange by supporting scores of young and more established scholars on fellowships to study at US universities, providing teachers to Indian universities for teaching specific courses on American Studies, organizing annual seminars for college teachers to familiarize them with American civilization and culture, and supporting intensive university programs at the postgraduate and doctoral level. …

Introduction: Law, Literature, and Ethnic Subjects

question is of the canon: what (and who) is given voice; who privileged, repeated, and invoked; who silenced, ignored, submerged, and marginalized. Law and have shared traditions--of silencing, of pushing certain stories to the margin and of privileging others. An obvious example in is the exclusion of certain books from the canon of the great books. --Judith Resnik, Constructing the Canon (221) There has been little engagement of the canon and of the notion of the canon. was urged upon the school with creative pluck. After the agenda made room for Homer and Melville, however, the audacity and openness stalled. For the most part, studies in Law and still do not venture outside a narrow range of standard, Harvard-and-its-sisters approved literature. Where are the new, more difficult translations, the equivalents in our practice to the topics Fish refers to in English studies: The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature or Lesbian Poetry in Texas? --Milner Ball, Confessions (190) In March 2000 over three hundred scholars interested in the study of American multiethnic literatures gathered in New Orleans for a MELUS conference entitled Multi-Ethnic Literatures and the Idea of Social Justice. driving force of the conference was the recognition while issues of social justice are among the most important concerns of minority writers, the works of these writers have largely been ignored by the law and literature movement in the legal academy. call of the conference was explicit: to engage in the active de-canonization of the field of and literature, and to show through example how the inclusion of emerging from a wide variety of ethnic experiences in America would challenge the settled assumptions of the field. To be sure, as our epigraphs suggest, this is not the first time the issue of canonicity in the domain of and has been raised. In a seminal article published in 1990, Carolyn Heilbrun and Judith Resnick demonstrated the overwhelmingly masculinist bias of the and movement. Drawing on Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette's 1987 empirical survey of and courses in thirty-eight schools, the authors argued the study of in schools assumes that if not totally absent, women are the other, the object of the male gaze, the subject of the discussion, not the speaker (1914). Furthermore, they noted a significant time-lag between scholarship being conducted in literary studies on the one hand and the and movement on the other. Much of what Heilbrun and Resnick noted in 1990 about the marginality of feminism and women's in the and movement is parallel to our own concerns about the continued marginality of multiethnic literatures in this movement. The really bad old days of literary criticism (and much else) have been left further behind by than by legal studies, state Heilbrun and Resnick. Feminist criticism and post-structuralist criticism have had almost twenty years in which to perfect theories and techniques, and to revise ideas of what to read and what to value. Surely could well benefit from the fruits of those decades, both in the reading of the new by women now available and in the reading and interpretation of texts not usually read in classes (1933). Scholars who have tracked the field might differ on the weight they place on the transformative effects of the Heilbrun and Resnick article. But article, along with others written at about the same time, seems to have spoken to a pressing need for a change in the orientation of the field. (1) In her follow-up survey, conducted in 1993, Elizabeth Villiers Gemette says, The most notable changes from the titles in the earlier survey relate to courses dealing exclusively with women and the law, none of which were reported in the earlier survey. …

The Significance of the "Multi" in "Multiethnic Literatures of the US"

Presidential Address March 2, 2001 MELUS 2001 Conference Knoxville, Tennessee She starts up stairs to bed. `Don't get me up with rest in morning.' `But thought you were having midterms.' `Oh, those,' she comes back in, kisses me, and says quite lightly, `in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit.' Some of you will no doubt recognize this passage from Tillie Olsen's often-anthologized mother-daughter story, I Stand Here Ironing. Well, half a century after publication of daughter Emily's glum prediction, we're still here. In a way, studying, reading, and writing imaginative literature implicates all of in Emily's worldview. Why bother? outsiders ask us--and at times we ask ourselves. Today, American youth say AS ...--or, Do care?--to render this point. Obviously, some of us--we suckers at this conference, for example--do care. And this is foundation to build on. As people who believe that literature by ethnic Americans matters, we have opportunity to challenge Emily's fatalism. Through an act of faith, we can reclaim two syllables in English language and convert AS IF from a dismissal to a promise. We continue to create works of art and to share these creations with others because life has value and we are not atom-dead. As long as life has value, ethnic literature is valuable--for this body of literature brilliantly captures life experiences and complex worldviews of a culturally and racially diverse people known as Americans. did not find my way back to academia until my mid-thirties, and to study of multiethnic literatures of United States until my doctoral dissertation in American studies. The first time around in college had gravitated toward newer discipline of comparative At Queens College in New York, instinctively knew that English curriculum in literature was hopelessly entrenched--leaving marginalized searchers like me no room to expand my thinking. took shelter in a crossover program that allowed me to include classical Chinese poetry, modern French novels, and seventeenth-century Spanish drama in their original languages. This seemingly eclectic menu taught me respect for written word; it cultivated my interest in peoples and cultures across time and space. was also built into field of comparative literature, however, was notion that American literature was a poor relation of great world literature. Europe was often equated with the world, and white male writers and professors were assumed to be--by birthright--unequivocally great. After a progressively alienating couple of years toward a PhD at University of Wisconsin, Madison, dropped out of academia. So here am at dawning of new millennium, back in academia and president of MELUS. Having served first year of my three-year term, what would like to say to all of you who made effort to be here today? Well, presenting my argument for an ethical approach to study of American literature is a start. As a multicultural, multiracial society, our literary productions are both culture-specific and nation-bound. Emphasizing ethnicity--as MELUS does--is decidedly a political stance. We should not take our academic positioning lightly. submit that when we use term multiethnic, we should mean it. Multiethnic means that our separately categorized ethnic identities--be they African American, Latino/a, American Indian, or whatever--should be approached cross-culturally. Each of is a member of at least one ethnic community that embraces other ethnicities, thereby moving all of past us against them habit of thought. The model of multiethnicity undercuts balkanization. In announcing theme of this year's conference MELUS call for papers asked question: What is relationship between literature of particular ethnic groups and broader study of multiethnic literature, and what are possible tensions? …

Mapping Carnivalistic Discourse in Japanese-American Writing

Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of literary carnival, which has constantly been refined in recent developments of literary and cultural studies, presents a vision of literature as comprising various carnivalizing forces in a process of constant shifts and movement that confront a totalizing center. Shifts and movement, as Stephen Sumida observes, have been historically and are currently occurring between margins and centers in Asian American Literature (807). concept of literary carnivalization, in opposition to canonization and totalization, suggests an interaction among various literary manifestations without polarity of high/low or central/marginal: The low thus no longer mirror-image subject of high, waiting in wings to substitute ... but another related but figure (Hall 9). carnivalistic discourse, moving beyond simplistic binary structure, informs and enacts the interstices and overlaps of literary practices and their shared differences. The carnivalized text, as Iris Zavala points out, according to Bakhtin's model, meeting ground of a complex semiotic system within a cultural sphere which incorporates linguistic structures and social (59). this sense, concept of carnivalization embodies Bakhtin's most democratic vision of culture and literature as non-hierarchical plural systems. other words, logosphere of multi-ethnic literatures provides a carnivalistic space for performing various cultural differences and opens up an area of `interfection' (to use Fredric Jameson's term) where newness of cultural practices and historical narratives are registered in `generic discordance' [and] `unexpected juxtaposition' (Bhabha, Location of Culture 217). What carnivalization subverts hegemonic power of totalization--the capability of certain formations to position everything else in a negative relationship to it (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 15). notion of carnival, therefore, one of most important concepts by which we can think, or rather unthink, workings of cultural totalization and literary canonization. What we need badly in today's literary and cultural criticism a carnivalistic mode of (un)thinking that accommodates rather than reduces variety of literary and cultural manifestations from a monologic position. This mode of (un)thinking will help us hear polyphonic voices, perceive heterogeneous performances, and recognize a variety of ways in which cultural systems come to know themselves by playing at being different (Holquist 230). If a means by which whole societies can represent to themselves (can collectively see) of their own pretensions (Holquist 230), then, carnivalistic mode of (un)thinking can reveal folly of cultural and literary hegemony by providing a perspective enabling one to view cultural totalization from non-monologic positions. As Stuart Hall observes, Bakhtin uses `carnival' to signal all those forms, tropes, and effects in which symbolic categories of hierarchy and value are inverted (7); however, carnival is not simply a metaphor of inversion, Hall hastens to add; In Bakhtin's `carnival,' precisely purity of this binary distinction which transgressed. low invades high, blurring hierarchical imposition of order; creating, not simply triumph of one aesthetic over another, but those impure and hybrid forms of `grotesque' (8). re-conceptualization of Bakhtin's theory of carnivalization can serve as a new agent of perception, a new way of reading and thinking that will enable us to discern some previously unnoticed or unnoticeable features of Japanese-American literature. By re-locating carnivalistic discourse in Japanese-American literature, we might be able to view or re-view better how literary and cultural theory can refine our thinking about what Japanese-American literature really is--a question that has been challenging critics for a long time. …